Track housing lottery opportunities around the city with this new map

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There's now one more way to keep up with new New York City housing lottery. It comes in the form of a map showing active lottery openings around the five boroughs.

Prior to the release of the map, the main option for cash-strapped New Yorkers seeking a long-term refuge from ever-rising rents by way of the housing lottery was to obsessively refresh NYC Housing Connect, the city-run portal that provides a list of the latest "affordable" rental opportunities.

The new map, released Wednesday, allows users to click on icons for each lottery address and see more details about the development, including the lottery application deadline, and a rough description of the income levels people have to be at to be eligible to apply. Curbed maintains a similar, manually updated map, with that info plus samples of rents for lottery apartments. Neither map includes the exact dollar threshold your household must be within to apply.

For that, you'll have to click through to Housing Connect, or refer back to a copy of an infographic the city just released to break down the income terminology. That graphic is here:

Another new tool allows you to search active lotteries by household size, income level, and borough.

People interested in trying to snag a housing lottery apartment should apply early and often (not more than once to any given building, though, or you could be disqualified), but also keep in mind that the new lotteries on Housing Connect are only a sample of what's out there. As we explain further in our guide to applying to the housing lottery, discounted units in existing mixed-income buildings become available when tenants move out, and owners of these buildings often rent these protected lottery units out themselves, rather than advertising through the city. To get on wait lists for these kinds of apartments, you'll need to call around or write to management companies (some ideas of where to start are here and here) to see if they're taking applications.

If you don't get the apartment on the first go-round, don't give up. It can take years, or in the case of one Brick contributor, nearly a quarter of a century of persistent applying to break through.

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